Our View: The bad news, the good news from the Mideast

Tuesday

Jun 17, 2014 at 8:16 PMJun 17, 2014 at 8:18 PM

The Obama administration clearly does not want another Benghazi on its hands, dispatching some 275 troops to protect employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other personnel as an especially vicious Sunni insurgency against the Shiite-controlled government makes its way to the capital. The former have already stormed their way through much of northern Iraq, taking some large and critical cities.

So serious is this threat that the White House has even indicated a willingness to work with Iran, which has not exactly been a pal, to help quell the uprising. This is the greatest risk to Middle East stability since the U.S. left Iraq entirely in 2011, a decision Americans can second-guess now but at the time, after a decade of nonstop war and the accompanying expenditure of U.S. blood and money, they did not much object to on the whole.

President Obama has vowed to not send Americans back into any kind of significant combat in Iraq, though the soldiers being deployed are equipped for that. Let us hope that he can keep that promise. Arguably we are again a bit late to the game.

Meanwhile, there is something to celebrate in the capture by U.S. Special Forces of the man — Ahmed Abu Khattala — believed responsible for the 2012 Benghazi attack that took the lives of four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. Amazingly, there has been some criticism of the timing of the raid as a way to divert attention from the crumbling and chaotic situation in Iraq. Can’t politics stop at the water’s edge, for once, in contemporary America? Give it a rest.